Judith Krantz (3 page)

“You’ve been to Australia?” he asked, following her directions without question.

“Last year … I loved it …” Jazz said, moving around with her first Canon, shooting quickly, her movements minimal, unalarming and all but invisible. She loved what she saw. The open coat revealed his magnificent bare chest, the elaborately carved rosewood of the sofa was an inspired frame to the sleek Italian coat, his blond hair on the dark velvet created a devilishly tantalizing contrast.

“Don’t you get homesick?” Her voice was low, without emphasis.

“Shit yes. I go home whenever I can.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“They’re super. My mother still makes me take out the rubbish and my sisters still introduce me to nice girls and my dad still worries about whether I’m saving money, so I give him all my business manager’s reports. Every weekend I play football for two whole days with the team I used to play center for.… Yeah, I’ve got to go home again soon.”

His homesick voice trailed off, his expression vulnerable, wistful, yearning. Sam Butler looked as wildly romantic as Olivier’s Heathcliff as he fell quiet,
thinking of the great football matches of long ago. Jazz padded about noiselessly, picking up one camera after another whenever she came to the end of a roll of film. Sam Butler had stopped being laughably flawless and became entirely real as his eyes filled with memory of a place and people fifteen thousand miles away.

He utterly forgot that he was being photographed while Jazz worked away in a hypnotic silence broken only by the languid melodies of the classical guitar. After minutes had passed, his memories suddenly faded and abruptly he noticed the intent, mesmerizing photographer, her skeins of hair rippling down on both sides of the camera, her tanned legs brazen and bare under the short skirt, her full breasts swaying slightly under the red wool smock that was almost transparent in the light that flooded from the window. Sam Butler moved restlessly on the velvet of the sofa, refocused his eyes, returned to the present moment and Jazz got an entire roll of the most stunningly sensual and dangerously lustful pictures anyone was ever to take of him.

This sitting’s over, she thought in alarm as he began to unbuckle the belt of the raincoat.

“Time to change film,” Jazz declared briskly, straightening up. But the tall Australian had moved quickly and caught her.

“Ever tried this sofa?” he asked, pulling her down beside him. With one arm he pinioned her firmly down so that she couldn’t move her upper body, and with the other he shrugged out of one shoulder of his raincoat.

“You’re being unprofessional.” Jazz still spoke haughtily even as she tried to kick away his legs with her bare feet. He laughed, adroitly changed the position of his arms, slipped out of both sides of the raincoat and threw it down on the floor.

“I said to take off your clothes,” Jazz cried in outrage, “not your underwear.”

“You didn’t ask if I wore any.” Now both of his hands were busily taking off her clothes while the full weight of his muscular, naked body made her struggles
futile. She should have taken that self-defense course, Jazz thought in panic while she tried to find a way to thrash out at him and do some damage. She’d made sure that nobody would hear her if she screamed. Too clever by half, she thought confusedly, as she felt him quickly undo the one button of her smock and take one breast in his hand even though her arms and legs were still helplessly flattened to the sofa by the entire weight of his long body.

“Stop!” she shouted, looking for a part of him she could bite.

“No woman ever said that to me before.”

“Egomaniac!”

“Truth,” he said, shutting her mouth with a kiss.

Suddenly the sofa bucked beneath Jazz’s struggling body, throwing them both to the floor. The entire studio swayed sickeningly around them, the floor lurched with a rending noise, doors banged loudly, the fearsome sound of heavy objects hurtling across the room was everywhere, and Jazz and Sam found themselves huddled together on the floor, clutching each other in speechless, shocked terror for endless seconds while the upheaval continued.

“What the fuck?” he whispered, when the building stopped moving. Jazz jumped quickly to her feet with the aplomb of a native Californian, checked first for broken glass and ran to the window, still wearing only her skirt.

“I’m getting the hell out of here,” Sam Butler shouted.

“Stay where you are! It’s not safer in the street. These old buildings can fall on you. We’d better look and see if a tidal wave is coming—in this neighborhood there’s always that possibility.”

“Tidal wave?”
His voice rose.

“Damn right, it should be right out there,” Jazz answered with conviction, pointing toward the ocean and leaning out of the window so he wouldn’t see her lips twitch upward at the corners. Aftershocks, for certain, she thought, but not a tidal wave. Not this time, anyway. It hadn’t been the Big One. From the
dressing room she heard the unmistakable sounds of a man cursing as he hastily stuffed himself into his clothes.

“If you need more pictures, we’ll do them on high ground,” he yelled at her as he headed toward the door.

“And in a crowd,” Jazz shouted after him. “Now I know why you have a reputation for being irresistible.”

He turned, indignantly. “You haven’t been very nice to me. Not at all. If I weren’t too much of a gent, I’d tell you to go fuck yourself.”

“You
, Sam Butler, will never get another chance,” Jazz laughed, arms covering her breasts. “And hey, throw me my hat, will you, on your way out?”

W
hat
would
they do without me? Phoebe Milbank, partner in Dazzle, and business representative for Jazz Kilkullen, Mel Botvinick and Pete di Constanza, asked herself that familiar question as she spread a thick layer of cream cheese on an onion bagel. She envisioned herself wearing the trim, starched uniform of a proper old-time British nanny, pushing a large, gleaming, navy blue baby carriage, a Rolls-Royce of baby carriages. As she came to a street crossing, with her three infantile charges safely tucked under a monogrammed coverlet, cooing and burbling to each other, she would merely gesture with one hand and a policeman would salute her respectfully, bringing a line of impatient, speeding cars to a total halt until she had safely, and in her own good time, reached the opposite curb and remounted the sidewalk.

In her sharply critical mind, which was entirely free of any trace of an inferiority complex, there was no doubt that left to themselves her photographers would all starve. She was their all-knowing guide in a
howling, unfriendly wilderness, that of the treacherous, complicated world of advertising and magazines in which photographs were offered for sale. All their creative powers would be as nothing if she were to desert them, for they were essentially helpless and hopelessly unable to manage their own affairs, like children in a burning building waiting for a fireman to come and save them. This situation was exactly as it should be and as she intended it to remain.

These pleasant thoughts occupied Phoebe during the first of the ten minutes that she scheduled for reflection, right before the monthly Saturday-morning meeting of the partners in Dazzle. This pre-meeting time with herself was sacred. It put her in the right frame of mind for any problems that might arise during the conference to come.

Phoebe got up and bounced around her office, rearranging the low-slung chairs that enabled her to look down upon everyone else from the tall chair that stood behind her desk. She was a tiny, shrewd, moppet-headed figure, with layer upon layer of bright yellow hair that had been fashionably distressed, at great cost, almost but not quite to the point of being ruined.

She was satisfied with her world. Her hair was ideal. Her pert, witty face that gave no clue to her crafty brain, was ideal. Her lean body was as close to ideal as any Twentieth Century Californian female could dream of. Every single one of her vertebrae was visible under her thin sweater, her hipbones poked sharp angles in her short knitted skirt, and no matter what she ate she never gained an ounce. At thirty-eight she knew that she could be mistaken, at first glance, for a cheerleader at UCLA.

Phoebe chose a fresh water bagel from the pile on the platter on her desk and larded it thickly with chive cream cheese. She was not, thank heaven, what she ate, she reflected. No, every photographer’s rep was who she represented. Like a horse trainer, her own status was established by her stable.

Phoebe, for all her sense of superiority, was free of unwarranted conceit. She had an acutely accurate
notion of her worth, and of that of others. Her own charges were the hottest trio in town, each at the red-hot peak of the profession. Without her they wouldn’t have reached this point. Of course she wouldn’t be where she was without them. But that essentially was beside the point. If not Jazz, Mel and Pete, three others would be in her stable.

Phoebe glanced at her watch. The meeting would start in five minutes. Still time to take stock, as she liked to do each month, to make sure that nothing was gaining on her in a fast-growing business that changed month by month.

Each one of her partners was a maverick, each a demon when it came to getting the shot; and each—and this was the most important thing about them—each one of them was far, far on the other side of
safe
.

Safe
, in photography today, was the only four-letter word left, as far as Phoebe was concerned. Every photographer with a decent portfolio could do safe, but only a few photographers in the game would consistently push beyond safe, into unexplored territory, and pull it off, without getting artsy-craftsy or blurring the client’s intention. And when they
did
go beyond safe, didn’t they always turn to her, their rep, to bring them back home a little, to keep them from being scared to death? Would they dare to be as controversial as they could be without knowing that she approved?

It wasn’t a question of technique, God knew. Two hundred photographers had technique, and another two hundred had taste; many millions—even civilians—could take pretty pictures. But her guys? Each one produced work that could be identified instantly by all the best photo buyers and art directors in the business. They were to the camera what any truly original painter was to canvas.

It had to do with two things, Phoebe mused, with two things she could identify: uniqueness of point of view and knowledge of lighting. No good knowing how to light anything from a spark plug to Michelle Pfeiffer without having a point of view. No good having
a point of view without a total command of the almost infinite possibilities of lighting.

And then there was that third thing she couldn’t exactly put a name to and neither could they. It was that third thing—some people called it, tamely, originality—but she thought of it as
outrageousness
—that made Jazz, Mel and Pete the best. There were too many merely good, capable, proficient photographers around today. Unless a photographer was willing, no, not just willing, but absolutely desperate to
exceed
the known limits of film, each and every time, he or she could never command the highest fees. Mel, Pete and Jazz had equals but no superiors, she thought, intent on fairness. A handful of equals each, it went without saying, belonging to a rep as good as she, of whom there were but three in California.

Any would-be rep would have found it impossible to find such photographers in Los Angeles fifteen years ago, Phoebe thought soberly, glad but not surprised that she had been born in the ideal time and place.

Almost all the top photographers used to live and work in New York. But that had changed swiftly, particularly in the fields of food, cars and celebrity portraits, and now much of the major talent was concentrated in Los Angeles. She had been in on it from the beginning.

Twelve years earlier, when she had just turned twenty-six, Phoebe had worked as photo assistant to Evan Jones, a portrait photographer who made a decent living taking flattering pictures of rich women to give to their husbands for Christmas.

His real genius lay in retouching. He never showed raw contact prints to his clients. First he made his own selection, ruthlessly throwing out all but the best photographs. Then he did some exceedingly discreet work with an airbrush, work so impossible to detect that he presented the contacts as if they were unretouched. Only after the flattered subject had chosen her favorite contact did he really go to town with
the airbrush and the tiny paintbrushes with which he added and subtracted; longer lashes, veinless hands, brighter pupils, thinner nostrils, lusher lips, smaller chins, perfect necks.

Though clever and kind, Evan had had a poor head for business. His accounts were badly kept and, worse, he had no idea of what constituted a fair price for his work. One day Phoebe, who had quickly realized that she didn’t have the talent or the patience to become an outstanding photographer, simply took over Evan’s office and began to run his business.

In a day she replaced herself with a far better assistant than she had ever been. She took his client list and called each of the women on it, reminding them that their old photographs were dated. She doubled his prices without asking him, knowing that his clients would only assume that he was asking more because he was worth more. Phoebe’s sister, office manager for one of the top plastic surgeons in Hollywood, and a member in good standing of the office-manager mafia, provided an ever-fresh list of women who needed new photographs to replace those that revealed an older face.

Within six months Evan had a long waiting list for portraits, and Phoebe had tripled his prices, keeping twenty-five percent of what he made for her services, a standard amount.

Now she was ready to move Evan into the film industry. She made up presentation books of his most successful portraits and dropped copies off at the offices of every publicist, business manager, makeup artist and hair stylist in Hollywood. She quadrupled his prices.

Female performers of a certain age—an age that began younger and younger every year—began to see Evan’s portraits. In less than a year he became the most popular photographer of that inexhaustible subject: women over twenty-one. His photos began to appear in magazine articles and on magazine covers, at the demand of his subjects. A great many women
had never looked so good, and quickly male performers joined their ranks. Phoebe bought herself a two-door Mercedes 560 in bright yellow to match her hair.